Re: can't compile master on MacOS 10.15 with fink

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 3:04 AM Uwe Brauer <oub@mat.ucm.es> wrote:

> I seem to remember that you are a (long term) Mac user, what is your
> opinion about the one provided by emacsformacox?
>

Note: I lost regular access to macOS about a year and a half ago.

The emacsformacosx option is solid for end-users, but I think still less
good for developers (caveat: not so for developers interested in helping
make a stable "emacsformacosx" package for macos users, versus people
interested in latest-and-greatest emacs HEAD development). It replaces fat
binaries with a ruby-based launcher that figures out which binary to run.
This might bother or you not (it bothered me, once upon a time). Beyond
that it seemed to be a faithful version of GNU Emacs built for macos, and
offers nightly builds for closing some of the gap I mentioned above.

An alternative is the "mac port", which replaces the ns specific code in
the GNU Emacs mainline with code that uses a different mac-specific
toolkit. This has the advantage that the toolkit code it uses is more
current and better maintained (the toolkit code used by the ns port is
potentially at/beyond its theoretical end of support), and the downside
that it doesn't support the non-macOS nextstep codebase. In practice, the
mac port is pretty popular, because it removes some rough edges that the ns
port basically can't avoid. You can find more information about the mac
port at https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/src/master/ and/or you can
use the popular homebrew packaging by user railwaycat.

Although my personal experience is a bit dated at this point, about a
decade of experience lead me to the conclusion that either the ns or mac
ports were better under macos UNLESS you also want to be able to open
frames on remote X displays. I mostly used the ns port built directly from
the GNU Emacs HEAD. I would be surprised if that had changed in the
meantime.

Hope that helps!
~Chad

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